Having the power and having the software to make use of it in a
reasonable manner are two different things. I have people who work in
the IT part of the govt and the software is seriously lacking. As an
example look at the IRS. They spent millions on a system and it never
did work right. My friend works at a government agency and they don't
even know what information they have and whether it is valid or not.
As a for instance he ran a program a couple of weeks ago on data from
the past 3 years run on an annual basis. He got no-hits of over 300K
from one year, 7 from another year and over a million from the 3rd
year. Would you care to trust that kind of information to take the
census? These programs have been used for years and nobody thought to
question the validity of the output. With that wide a variance for the
various years I would first be questioning the validity of the program.
Then if that worked I would be looking at where the data came from and
how it was harvested. In any case I think enough questions should be
raised that the data would not be usable with any guarantee as to
whether it was good or not.
Work is going on to solve a lot of these things but the problem is that
the people who should be raising the questions that would lead to these
errors being corrected and having the programs come up with valid data
are not raising the questions. They are sitting there and just
accepting what is handed to them without bothering to verify it. From
my own experience and from the experience of many friends who have at
one time or another had dealings with the government this is one of the
reasons I want nothing to do with the government handling my
healthcare. If they can't even come up with a valid count from data
that they collected themselves, why would I trust them to handle my
medical data properly.
studio wrote:
I never did understand why the government doesn't use it's own
statistics to help determine the population such as;
Social Security, IRS, FBI, other...
Why it's against the law evades me.
Computers can be made so that only a few people have access to any
information in them. And even then, the computer can make a log of
what information is accessed by whom.
I'd also like to know why the Census Bureau doesn't have online forms
to fill out. (?)
You'd think with all this computer power the government is supposed to
possess, they'd put it to some constructive use. Bunch of BS artists
if you ask me.
It's just another matter of government agencies *not* talking to one
another...or more specifically, not the people, the computers not
talking to one another.
Yes, it's all a grand out-of-date scheme.
The government continues to live in a thousand year old form while the
rest of the real world is in the 21st century.
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
